(Port of Veracruz, New Spain, 1560 CE)

The uncharted lands of North America, at mid-16th century, stretched northward and westward from Central America as a mysterious and uncharted continent. It continued to attract a truly exceptional collection of individuals from Europe-first as explorers, second as colonists and merchant sailors. They had all taken up the challenge to survive the odds of an over-seas journey, and in the process, make their mark or fortune in large and small ways. The young Greek pilot they called Juan de Fuca, was one such person who had the quiet distinction of being singled out initially for a special mission to the Americas, located through royal messengers by the dying queen of an empire, Joanna of Castile.

'Joanna the Mad,' Queen of Spain, was to pass away within a year of her secret compact with the pilot and he had been promised to be paid handsomely with the completion of the final stage of her mission. That verbal contract he understood well. It was to deliver and construct a portable marble tomb, designed long ago and cut from the sacred green stones of the Greek island Tinos. The destination for this structure was to be somewhere on the distant coast of California, thought at the time to be a large island at the edge of the world. Though he did not know for whom the tomb would be intended, De Fuca was aware that the project, highly unusual but seriously orchestrated, would take years and the right opportunity to carry out.

His secret cargo of three hundred eighty-two marble blocks precisely shaped would be safely delivered to an estate not far from the Port of Veracruz on the eastern coast of New Spain. De Fuca escorted the cargo across the Atlantic on the ship, 'Santa Caterina,' to his first port of entry, Havana, Cuba. From there after a respite of five days he and the crew sailed on for another fourteen days due to difficult weather to his destination of Veracruz.

It was an elderly, stout, and sun-tanned woman who contacted him there in the half-destroyed port upon the afternoon of his arrival. As the carrack embarked she was with several personal attendants, waiting on the dock to meet him. The woman greeted him as if she had known him a good many years, and the young man was perplexed that she would be so precise in her arrival and understanding of who he was. When they were briefly alone, she quietly put forward in broken Greek and Castilian the plan he was to continue concerning the 'special cargo' which she somehow knew full well existed as ballast stones within the hull of the Santa Caterina.

This mysterious woman, named Señora Gallego y Delgado, was the widow of an influential land owner, who, with her late husband had made a sizeable fortune in New Spain owning and managing several silver mines to the northwest. It was rumored that she had known the royal family in Madrid personally, and had been a childhood friend of the late Queen. Surprising to De Fuca was that she knew enough Greek for the two of them to communicate in a running bastardization of both languages. The large green estate on which she lived had been built on a spacious clearing within the jungle, featuring a view of the port below. It was flanked by two sizeable plantations on adjacent tracts of fertile land. The elderly woman was well-respected by the other hidalgo families of Veracruz for her able continuation of the mining business after her husband had died. It was said that she rode overland into the mountains each month on horseback to oversee the work being done, and that when she was alone she smoked cigars.

On her property within the outskirts of Veracruz, Señora Delgado kept scores of native and African male slaves working her farms. She also employed several Castilian families at her 'hacienda' to assist with the domestic work. It was these Spanish workers who accompanied her on the day of De Fuca's arrival at seaside. She, along with a foreman from her estate arranged with the captain of the Santa Caterina-only too happy to be ferrying contraband, to offload the "secret cargo" onto the dock that evening in the moonlight. The stones were put onto three of Margarita Delgado's private wagons and pulled by mule team up to her estate, approximately a league and a half away.

Upon arriving at her 'hacienda' with the stones and small entourage, De Fuca was treated as a special guest and allowed to stay on the estate for several days. There his future and official employ as a pilot with the 'Flota'-the "Spanish treasure fleet" could be secured through her connections with the Veracruz port authorities. The young pilot found this matron of the territory to be charming and resolved to assist with the same mission for which he had been employed. He also was introduced to a Spanish family, several men of whom acted as administrators of the mining and farming operations, and their wives and daughters who assisted with the interior housework and outside gardens of the Senora's grand 'hacienda.'

De Fuca would spend the next five years working aboard ships in the Spanish West Indies ferrying back and forth to Spain. He would gain the respect of the captains and ship owners who associated around the "Spanish Main"-the numerous ports of call within the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic western coast of Central America. Several times a year a convoy of vessels under armed guard would gather from Veracruz, Cartegena and Porto Bello to meet in Havana, Cuba. There they would sail more safely in numbers and under armed escort back to Spain.

De Fuca understood that while working these years aboard a variety of such ships, he would await any further instructions from Senora Delgado regarding their "special cargo.' They both patiently prepared for the right opportunity to transport the green stones overland by mule train from Veracruz to Acapulco on the west coast of Mexico (New Spain). It was from there that their future shipment would be ferried up California's coast by ship, as per Juana of Castile, the "mad queen's" original plan.

Those five years were a time when a massive shipbuilding effort was underway in the ports of the Spanish Main, both on the Atlantic and Pacific sides of New Spain. To the south in Guatemala ships were being built on the design of the 'Peru ship.' These were solid, lateen rigged caravels, suited for sailing closer into the wind, up the coast of Peru to Panama. Mule trains would bring precious metals and stones, mined from the interior of these territories, across the Isthmus of Panama to Portobello to be ferried by the "Flota" back to Seville, a journey sometimes lasting several months.

On the western side of New Spain in the coastal port of Tijuantepec, ships were being designed and built to be much larger, with square rigged sails for running with the wind across the massive Pacific to the Far East. These enormous cargo-carrying vessels would become known as the 'Spanish Galleons.' They would eventually be deployed, one ship a year, filling their holds with spices from the Moluccas, along with tons of porcelain, silks and lacquer goods, brought to Manila from China, and traded for Spanish silver. The successful return of just one of these super-tanker galleons would earn the ship owners, the captain and the Crown of Spain a fortune on the European market for these luxury goods. But the risks could be formidable, especially to the crew. This was due to starvation, exhaustion and the dreaded disease scurvy inherent to all such longer journeys at sea.

Juan de Fuca, while in the West Indies and Americas for forty some years, under the employ of the Spanish Royal Navy, would see duty as a pilot and navigator on several of these Galleons, both in the Atlantic and the Pacific. He would from 1555 to 1560 work onboard the "treasure fleet' routed back and forth to Spain across the Atlantic. In the Caribbean and North Sea, hurricane seasons and winter storms were just as much a threat to mariners as the pirates. Three times over this five year period De Fuca's ship was boarded by such marauders and once he was wrecked in a storm on a reef off the south coast of Hispaniola, loosing half the crew.

De Fuca had even been seriously injured once by a cutlass wound to his shoulder, before the band of local island pirates who attempted to board his ship were thwarted by harquebus fire, killing two and wounding five. In that incident the pilot De Fuca luckily avoided a dreaded infection from his sword lacerations by applying boiled seawater and herbal applications over the next weeks, taught to him by the American natives who sometimes worked aboard these ships. On another occasion while navigating on a large caravel, an English crew of 'privateers' attacked on the high seas with their warship several leagues from the mouth of Gibraltar. The pirates avoided using their cannons in deep water so as not to sink the ship and loose the precious cargos they intended to steal by overpowering the Spanish crew. In this case, turning upward into the wind, the caravel beat into weather faster than the English ship could manage with its square rigged sails and the lateen sails of the Spanish vessel saved the day for the pilot.

By the mid-1560s De Fuca still awaited word from Senora Delgado as to when he would again be able to work toward carrying out his mission to the California coast. No further expeditions up that coast had been granted by the new Viceroy of New Spain, Luís de Velasco, or the Crown of Castile since both explorers Cabrillo and Coronado made disappointing returns from the western coastal and inland frontiers. Most ambitious maritime investors, however, in both the Americas and Spain were now looking east across the Pacific for the next boom in shipping and sustainable wealth in Asian trade. While the costs and dim chances of any useful discoveries at that time on the desolate northwestern coast of California were seen only as a liability to Phillip II, the new King of Spain, a new route to the East Indies from Mexico was seen potentially as highly profitable could it only be navigated. A successful return route from the East Indies to Mexico needed to be discovered and established as a key to this venture.

Juan de Fuca had the trust and respect of several captains who had been anticipating word that a feasible return route to the Far East could be, in fact, successfully maneuvered. Five attempts had already ended in tragic failures, however, as the return trip to Mexico had thus far been proven to be too formidable and all but impossible. This was due to the prevailing easterly winds in the Pacific. These strong gales, which drove the ships across the Pacific from Mexico to the Spice Islands easily, would not permit the same trip back, as the sailing technology of the times did not permit sailing so directly back into these fierce winds. Several bold adventurers whom De Fuca by then had met personally in the Atlantic trade route were, by the 1560's looking to be considered to command such an expedition across the Pacific and to explore the possible and lucrative routes back. Everyone involved in such speculation for this new route could envision how, if successful, it would revolutionize Spanish trade with the Asia.

It had been known as early as 1522 with the westward sailing out of Spain with Magellan's two ships, that when they rounded the tip of South America, though the Straits of Magellan and headed northeastward to the Spics Islands of Indonesia, a logical sailing route could certainly be made from Mexico across this vast ocean. It was relatively parallel to the equator and along what were known as the "trade winds." Later an expedition led by a captain Garcia Joffre de Loasysa, made it to these islands by sailing from Mexico's west coast. His ship in 1527, like Magellan's own Trinidad, upon attempting a return, was turned back and eventually wrecked trying to sail to the Americas east across the Pacific. This disastrous attempt by Loasysa resulted in the eventual capture of his ships and their crews by natives. He was also subjected to the intervention of the Portuguese who had already established colonies there. The shear isolation and hunger resulting from not being able to return to the Spaniards' homeland in New Spain resulted in the expedition's total demise. This tragedy and others occurred because of the contrary winds which continually blow just above and below the equator perennially east to west. This strong physical phenomenon disallowed the ability of the conventional sailing ships to beat back against these gales with any eastward progress.

Earlier, in 1542, only months after Cabrillo's departure up the California coast, an explorer named Ruy López de Villalobos sailed out of Navidad, New Spain with an expedition of six ships and three-hundred eighty men to cross the Pacific Ocean and try and establish a permanent Spanish presence in the East Indies. It was one of the last bold actions of Viceroy Mendoza in New Spain to acquire wealth for himself and his king back in Spain. Within one year, this expedition which discovered and named the Philippine islands, failed in its attempts to return, like those before it. Fighting extreme hunger, violently inhospitable islanders, and again the military intervention of the Portuguese, only one-hundred seventeen of the original Spanish contingent of mariners and soldiers made it back to Lisbon, Portugal as prisoners.

Two thirds of the original contingent of three hundred men on this enterprise perished. The survivors accomplished their good fate only after sailing west around Africa. It was the established Portuguese route to Europe. Villalobos, himself had died on this expedition in a Portuguese prison, not so much from the fever he contracted but from a "broken heart," it was said, failing to return with all his men.

It would eventually take a concentrated study by the Council of the Indies in Seville over the next critical years to thoroughly analyze the sailing conditions of this tempestuous region of the world to find any solution to the elusive route homeward from the East Indies to New Spain. Five separate voyages had failed tragically attempting a return route from the Moluccas and the Philippine Islands. They resulted in the loss of a dozen ships and many hundreds of men. This passage, facing De Fuca and his new generation of navigators homeward from the Spice Islands was still considered a "closed door."

What came out of Seville from the studies of mariners, cartographers and pilots who knew the weather patterns of the area were two essential concepts necessary to solve the problem of evading the prevailing easterly winds. The first was what De Fuca and other pilots working the Atlantic Ocean already knew-that the wind patterns across a large ocean behaved in a wide circular path. As was known, along the equator the winds carried ships easily westward to the Philippine Sea where the many island groups were scattered. To get back to the eastern Pacific, a large circle had to be made, first sailing northward towards the Sea of Japan to around the 43rd parallel. At this point an eastward tack could be made. This direction was a fast sail across the top of the Pacific, rounding the 'big circle.' When the North American continent came into sight, somewhere around the central coast of California, a southeastern course was taken as a jibe. This would carry the ship southward around in the great gyre, a route the Spanish would come to call the 'volta'-or "long walk." From this point it was just a steady run down the coast of California to Acapulco, Navidad, and the other western ports of New Spain-the last leg of a long and grueling journey.

The second concept to be mastered about sailing this area of the world was the weather conditions in the Philippine Sea. To understand this, pilots had to be aware of the Monsoon seasons-strong directional gales which blow regularly across these waters into and away from of South East Asia. The wind and rain storms that frequent this part of the world create a natural force which can be used to drive the ships into the island chains in the winter from the east, and carry them out of these archipelagos to the north in the summer. Without realizing this "swinging door" phenomenon and how it could be utilized to enter and exit the Philippine Sea, mariners were doomed to failure simply trying to sail east back out of the region.

By the 1560s navigators and pilots, including de Fuca, were anticipating some such potential trade route would be seriously proposed from Mexico, across the Pacific to the Spice Islands and China-and to return safely by this alternate 'volta' route home. Knowing that a return trip would involve first a northward jibe almost to Japan, and then a southeastward run to the coast of California, Juan de Fuca was sure to have the continued opportunity to carry out his compact with his original benefactress, the former Queen of Spain. Her only final request was that the tomb he would ferry in the hold of his ship be carried and eventually placed "on the California coast, somewhere hidden, and beautifully situated . . . for all eternity."

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